You may not like the reporting style but the fact of the matter is they told the cold hard truth about our industry and it's lack of oversight.

USPA is a joke on publishing safety! USPA taking action to "clean up" the industry is a joke! Every little write up in parashitty about safety and "doing the right thing" is all a line of BULLSHIT! USPA is full of hypocrites and has a long history of turning a blind eye and sweeping shit under the rug to cover up for the good old boy network. FACT!

USPA is fucking joke on upholding the GM pledge! And the only real good coming out of HQ is the office of Randy Ottinger and his work on airport access the rest of it is all window dressing and total bullshit being conducted by a handful of hypocrites.

If you don't like the facts being pointed out in the media then maybe you should work harder to change that.... USPA seems to think their marketing dollars are well spent with all the fluffy stories.... but don't want own up to or print the information they get about rogue operators that is proven by the FAA and the NTSB to be true and factual!

Nope USPA leadership from the top down would choose to lie and misinform the membership while protecting those rouge operators by not publishing the facts, but rather USPA would choose to spend membership dues to try to claim FAA inspectors are in cahoots with disgruntled skydivers to frame operators in the industry, despite a a huge mountain of proven facts. And USPA would make a formulated plan to attempt to throw an FAA inspector, who was a USPA member of 35 yrs and additional USPA members under the bus in a lame attempt to sweep shit under the rug.

This is not the first time USPA has taken such actions towards USPA members and it will not be the last time.

All it will take is one major skydiving disaster with a bunch of violations as the cause and with all the FOIA documents out there floating around proving how USPA has been doing this shit for years, can and will prove everything that was said in this story as to lack of oversight and those are in fact foxes guarding the hen house.

This might belong in Safety and Training, for no other reason than the fact that it took this D.B. Cooper wanabee "two years" to pull this scam.

We all know how the media is going to exploit and create issues where there are none, what is particular disturbing is the relish and improvisation they undertook to create this work of fiction. The problem is that so much of our gullible public accepts our media services as fact and then the consequences to the rest of us follow...

The individual who has perpetrated this particular pile of horse plucky; Gerardo Flores who has obviously created this "Go Pro" moment for his own particular agenda, should be strung up and shot. How many of you out there will support your local DZ now when the local DZ starts to flex their disciplinary muscle? Personally this individual should have been blacklisted before he exited the aircraft. The fact that he went to great lengths to deceive everyone around him speaks volumes about his motives and his intention in the first place. Watch and listen to the video carefully and you will see the tell tale signs of a scam artist at work. He basically lays out this carefully crafted deception and narrates it as well. The learning is the road map and behavior he undertakes as the events actually unfold.

Some of you may point out that I might be engaging in a blame the victim type of thinking here which is an issue that might be worthy of discussion if not for the blatant disregard and contempt that this individual has shown to the skydiving community at large. Unfortunately this type of behavior by opportunistic individuals is on the rise and the only constructive conduct at this point is to actually write the local news station and lobby the facts as well as point out the intentional deception and self promotion at the expense of the skydiving community that Mr. Flores is engaged in.

Just my two cents and thirty years of experience working with real accident victims and real scam artists,… It’s fairly easy to spot the difference, and yes it’s very difficult to prove either. C

what lax oversight exactly? wannabee inexperienced jumper brings a small camera on board.

Perhaps people would prefer that each DZ and DZO personally interviews each and every skydiver before they board the plane to make sure of their intentions, gear, experience, abilities, and a thorough review of all decision making processes to be involved in the jump prior to allowing anyone to make a skydive.

yep, that will save a lot of time and lives.....

Sounds like the DZ did all that and that he failed to tell anyone he was planning to take a camera onboard or on the skydive. Also no explanation about why he passed out when there was really no reason for him to have that problem due to an early activation.

I expect more to come on this, rather than try and speculate who is at fault here.

This is no Scott Lutz, Lutz pulled his cutaway, then the AFFI dumped the boc to complete the sequence. Lot's of first jumps go south at pull time, nothing new there, it's Lutz's bull shit attitude and comments pandering to anyone that would listen that made Lutz the star he is today. The only semblance to Lutz the clutz was the post narration blaming everyone and anything else for perhaps, albit, an understandable situation...

If your trying to make a comparison; re the total lack of any personal responsibility and blame everyone else then that's a great observation.

You will notice this same behavior in Monteray as it is actually happining'. And this is precisly what seperates this scam artist from Lutz the clutz!

The pre-planing and intent will be obvious to any half witted insurance / Lawyer / any FAA / NTSB/ anyone who has been through this type of crap in their past. The unfortunate thing is how much damage both cash wize and reputation wize is this low life going to cause?? And I stongly suspect the gag orders have already gone out which makes getting any real info almost impossible at this point.!!

"I thought I saw him just lay down after landing..."

He obviously needed to get comfortable before he started his act!

The Go-Pro is also highly edited and you don't hear him respond to questions posed by the first people on the scene!!!

Unconscious individuals as a rule don't moan like they have a pole up their ass...

I was agreeing with you Dan? A good observation, I'm going a step further and pointing out that there is a lack of continuity and the information we have has been carefully edited to show only one side of a story!!

Did this happen in Aug of 2012?

Why hasen't the WHOLE tape been shown? Why has this idiot carefully posted pictures everywhere on the web and only half of them out of an unknown total number been shown? Why does the audio cut out on the ground? There are a number, a really large number of things that stink here, in addition to the helmet he uses, this thing stinks like an ad for Go-Pro... Two weeks in the hospital??? Prove it! Some crappy pictures that show a hung slider??? I can't tell if they are actual pictures in sequence or not because of the shitty and misleading editing!

Your spot on here, see what else you can find??? Cause obviously he's prepping for a law suit...

This link, but I suspect this link isn't going to be around long cause when the FAA see's it they will be going after the news station...

http://cbssanfran.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/faa-report.pdf

I suspect he will be going after the school? Someone there might want to chime in on this??

Additionally he post's jump number 29, he says it's jump number 29 in the vid and then he posts jump number 30 all on utube in September of 2012??? So what waas jump number 30? Suppoosed crash on 9 Aug 2012 BUT well enough to post shit videos in the following week on utube, give me a fucking break!

And why can't he grab his left toggle? Because he is too busy filming himself v clearing his slider?

Please also note that this suppoosed report states that they "SAW" two broken lines!!! BUT upon examination of the rig...WHOA the two lines are no longer broken??? Chain of custody???

This is the problem with this joke of a report! Hey if Nixion can get away with erasing tapes, why cant't flores get away with suspension lines that are not broken???

"No wind," it clearly states in the report, O'H more bull shit where is the section on current conditions. How about posting the fucking USPA report the S&TA is supposed to fill out??? BACK to the wind...did anyone notice the canopy draging his sorry ass right after the landing??? or did you notice it flying in the breeze, how many knots exactly to fly a canopy on the ground??? and than gently quaff to the ground behind him??

Take that report and put it where it will do the most good, in a landfill because it is useless.

After reading that report it is quite possible that he will try to sue and claim that the worn out gear was the cause. Although anyone with his "training" and "years" in the sport should have known how to inspect the gear

Unfortuntely this is a very sue happy country and people get away with ridiculous lawsuits all the time.

After reading that report it is quite possible that he will try to sue and claim that the worn out gear was the cause. Although anyone with his "training" and "years" in the sport should have known how to inspect the gear

Unfortuntely this is a very sue happy country and people get away with ridiculous lawsuits all the time.

Clearly the jumper caused a lot of the problem himself. Less discussed so far is the role of the gear.

The FAA report shows the gear was inspected by Allen Silver, a very well known rigger in the emergency parachute market for pilots. I'm not sure if he's at all involved in skydiving now, but apparently he has 3200+ jumps.

[Edit: removed question about source of FAA report. There's a link in the news article I now see.]

I guess Allen has very high standards. One wonders what he'd think of a lot of older student & rental gear out there! On the video it appears the gear is an Eclipse, so it will be an older set of gear.

(In his published documents, he believes all reserve parachutes should not be packed beyond 20 years of age ... at least when talking about rounds for pilots.)

The report says the container was worn "beyond serviceable limits". Same for the harness. Those are fairly major accusations. Maybe the DZ could have maintained the gear better, but the accusation is absolute. The report is so short and without graphics that we unfortunately don't have any evidence to help us understand Allen's criticism.

The description of the worn velcro on the main flap is a little vague. The Eclipse uses tuck tabs on the main pin cover flap, but there is velcro on the bottom flap apparently tucked under the right flap, to help secure the bridle on its way to the BOC. Maybe it was this velcro that was worn out.

But then no mention is made of the BOC condition, although it acknowledges that there was inconclusive evidence about the packing and placement of the PC in its pouch.

The report also notes that lines were "tied (knotted) in place on cells 4 and 5". Interesting indeed, although not further explained?!

The jumper was faced with a premature opening after only brief non-belly exposure, something that shouldn't happen even if it was inadvertent loss of stability. (Even non freefly friendly gear for novices isn't supposed to do that.) Unfortunately we don't know to what degree it really was gear condition vs. pilot chute packing related etc. The jumper may well have been faced with an emergency that was not his fault, even if he made poor decisions before, during and after the flight.

As for going unconscious: I think new jumpers don't always get taught about how to make leg straps comfortable, as it is second nature to experienced jumpers. For students the emphasis tends to be on not having straps too loose, even if we might say to have them "tight but not so tight that they are cutting off circulation". That being said one doesn't know exactly why he lost consciousness.

Maybe I missed seeing an edit, but he opened at about 38s on the video, and his hand with the gopro dropped down at around 1:24 (very roughly). This might just be a convenient, unexplained edit point by the news station, but if it does represent him losing consciousness, that's only 45 or so seconds after opening. Then he'd be screwed even if he pulled at a normal altitude.